VideoNuze Posts

Sports has been on the forefront of the streaming revolution from the start. Whether it’s early successes like the NCAA basketball tournament or the unprecedented scale of the 2016 Summer Olympics or more recently Thursday Night Football on Twitter and Amazon, sports have continued to push the boundaries of what’s possible with online and mobile delivery.

To better understand what’s happening with streaming sports and the best practices today, Akamai is presenting a free webinar on Thursday, October 19th at 1pm ET, which I will be hosting with Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia, my weekly podcast partner. Joining us will be Clark Pierce, SVP, TV Everywhere and Special Projects at Fox Digital Consumer Group and Ben Weinberger, SVP and Chief Product Officer at Sling TV. Both Fox and Sling TV have been leaders in streaming sports, so Clark and Ben have a wealth of knowledge to share.

In the webinar we’ll also explore distinct new value propositions being created by streaming sports, key challenges and what’s ahead. We’ll draw on insights from Akamai’s recently published thought-leadership paper, Game On! How Streaming Sports is Heating Up, in which we interviewed executives at 8 companies leading the charge on streaming sports. Game On can be downloaded here.

For anyone involved in streaming sports, the webinar will be extremely valuable - register now!

I’m pleased to present the 389th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

On today’s podcast, David Tice, SVP, Consulting at GfK, a global market research company, joins us to discuss factors Disney should be considering about how to price its OTT service that will launch in 2019.

David has researched for several years the maximum perceived value that subscribers of Netflix, Amazon and Hulu place on these services, finding that there’s a “natural limit” of around $11 per month per service. Value perceptions have increased a bit over the past 3 years but have stayed in a relatively tight range between approximately $8-$11 per month.

The research highlights the tight spot that Disney is in, because given the extensive content CEO Bob Iger has indicated will be included and the need to protect existing pay-TV relationships, the company will be very tempted to price higher than $11 per month, just as HBO Now has done. However, such a decision could significantly limit demand as occurred with HBO Now.

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Connected TVs and set-top box delivered VOD now account for 49% of ad views on premium video, according to FreeWheel’s Video Monetization Report for Q2 ’17. That’s a small bump from the combined 48% they accounted for in Q1 ’17, but a huge increase from the combined 1% back in Q2 ’13.

In Q2 ’17, connected TVs drove 29% of ad views, up from 23% in Q2 ’16 while STBs drove 20% of ad views up from 17% a year earlier. Coincidentally, Roku, which has the largest share of the connected TV market and priced its initial public yesterday, has said that advertising and other “platform revenues” will be critical to its growth going forward.

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TiVo has released its Q2 ’17 Video Trends Report, finding among other things that satisfaction with the value of pay-TV among subscribers noticeably increased over the prior quarter even as price remains a major concern, and a driver of cord-cutting.

TiVo found that 31.2% of subscribers said they’re “very satisfied” with the value of their pay-TV service, up 7.5 percentage points vs. Q1 ’17 and 11.6 percentage points over the past 2 years. Another 52.9% of subscribers said they’re “satisfied,” roughly flat with Q1 ’17. Respondents saying they’re “unsatisfied” dropped 6.9 percentage points vs. the prior quarter to 15.9%.

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NBCU is enabling clients to buy national TV ads using a self-serve programmatic TV approach. The new private market arrangement is powered by technology provider 4C. NBCU already works with AOL, TubeMogul and Videology to enabling programmatic buying of its ad inventory. The first client using the self-service approach is Target, which will be able to meld its first-party customer data with NBCU’s own audience data to target certain viewers with ads.

Target’s agency of record is GroupM’s Essence, which is where Adam Gerber, formerly SVP of Client Development and  Communications at ABC, was recently appointed SVP of Investment for North America.

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PeopleTV is aggressively pursuing its ad-free, OTT strategy by leveraging its well-known People brand, deep intellectual property and innovative original programming. PeopleTV is the new brand for the People/Entertainment Weekly (PEN) brand that was launched a year ago. Susanne Mei, PeopleTV’s GM, told me in a briefing that “PEN” didn’t have any inherent meaning to its target audiences, so to simplify things, the network has adopted the PeopleTV brand though ET content will remain integral to the content strategy.

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I’m pleased to present the 388th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

Colin was at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam for much of the past week and on today’s podcast he shares some of his top observations. These include how TV networks are moving online, how blended subscription/ad-supported business models are being used, and the role of artificial intelligence, among others.

We then shift to review recent research I’ve written about (here and here) from Adobe, Limelight and Pew quantifying how younger viewers are embracing streaming services at the expense of pay-TV. Of course this isn’t a new trend, but it is clearly accelerating.

Listen in to learn more!
 
Click here to listen to the podcast (21 minutes, 30 seconds)

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The VideoNuze podcast is also available in iTunes...subscribe today!